Fat Liberation Resources for Athletes Who Want to Go Deeper

Most of the body positivity conversation happening in fitness spaces was not built by or for fat people. It was built by relatively thin people, often white, with marketable before-and-after stories and palatable enough aesthetics to land brand deals. That's not an accusation. It's just the landscape.

A listener wrote to us after one of our body image episodes. She was recovering from RED-S, hitting PRs, gaining muscle, doing everything right, and she still felt like every voice telling her to heal was coming from a thinner body than hers. She wasn't wrong. The wellness-to-recovery pipeline has a size problem, and if you've noticed it, you're not imagining things.

What we can do is point you toward the people who built the intellectual foundation a lot of us are standing on, often without knowing it. This list exists because this conversation is bigger than any single podcast. Your Diet Sucks lives at the science-and-sport end of the nutrition world, and that has limits. These writers, activists, athletes, and clinicians don't have those limits.

This list is not exhaustive. It will grow.

Fat Liberation Books Worth Reading First

Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology — Start here. Taylor argues that shame about our bodies is a tool of oppression, and that dismantling it is a collective project, not a personal wellness goal. The entry point for a reason.

Da'Shaun Harrison, Belly of the Beast — On anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Essential for understanding why fat liberation that doesn't center Black fat people is incomplete. This is the book that reframes the whole conversation as structural rather than individual.

Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body — The historical architecture underneath all of it. Strings traces how thinness became a racial and moral category. Academic but accessible, and it will reorganize how you think about every diet-culture claim you've ever encountered.

Virgie Tovar, You Have the Right to Remain Fat — Concise, funny, and uninterested in waiting for you to get to an acceptable size before you start living. One of the most accessible entry points in the space.

Virginia Sole-Smith, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture — Sole-Smith's reporting on how weight stigma operates inside families, schools, and pediatric medicine is some of the sharpest journalism in this space. Fat Talk is grounded in research and in the specific, underreported harm of raising children inside a culture that pathologizes their bodies. Her Substack, Burnt Toast, does this work on a weekly basis.

Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat — Gordon writes specifically about very fat experiences: the medical erasure, the social exclusions, and the ways body positivity has historically stopped just short of actually including the people who need it most. Her co-hosted podcast Maintenance Phase (with Michael Hobbes) is mandatory listening.

Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman — West was writing about fatness, misogyny, and internet culture before most mainstream outlets would touch it, and doing so with more wit and structural clarity than most. Shrill is memoir, but it's also a precise account of what fat women are actually navigating and why "just be confident" is not a policy response.

Kiese Laymon, Heavy: An American Memoir — Not strictly fat liberation, but Laymon's book on body, Blackness, and family is one of the most honest accounts of what it means to live in a body that other people have opinions about. Read it.

The Fat Underground, Fat Liberation Manifesto (1973) — Judy Freespirit and Sara Aldebaran. The document that started it. Short, radical, and still relevant fifty years later.

Lisa Tetrault (ed.), Shadow on a Tightrope (1983) — The Fat Underground's collected essays, articles, and poems. One of the earliest primary texts of fat activism. Dense and essential if you want to understand where this movement came from.

Fat Athletes Actually Doing the Thing

Mirna Valerio — Ultrarunner, author of A Beautiful Work in Progress, and one of the most visible fat athletes in endurance sport. She has been showing up in a body the running world would prefer to ignore for years, and doing it with more grace than the running world deserves.

Latoya Shauntay Snell (Running Fat Chef) — Runner, chef, and writer whose work sits at the intersection of fatness, race, and endurance sport. Her presence in the running community has consistently expanded what people think that community can look like.

Weight-Inclusive RDNs and Clinicians

Christy Harrison, MPH, RD — Registered dietitian, anti-diet advocate, and host of Food Psych. Harrison brought HAES (Health at Every Size) and intuitive eating frameworks into the sports and nutrition mainstream. Her work on the diet culture industry is some of the most accessible writing in this space.

Jonah Soolman, RD — One of the few RDs working specifically at the intersection of sports nutrition and HAES. If you're an athlete who has been told you can't be both fat and serious about performance, his work is worth your time.

Podcasts and Films

Maintenance Phase — Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes investigate wellness myths and the history of diet culture with meticulous research and genuine humor. If you're here from Your Diet Sucks, this is your next stop.

Fattitude (2018) — Documentary examining how media shapes cultural attitudes toward fat bodies. A solid overview of the landscape and what's actually at stake.

Burnt Toast (Substack and podcast) — Virginia Sole-Smith on diet culture, parenting, and the specific ways weight stigma operates in everyday life. Weekly, research-backed, and one of the better models of how to do this work in public.

Your Fat Friend (Film)— I love this documentary about Aubrey Gordon!

A Note on This List

We built this resource because the question our listener asked deserves more than a podcast shoutout. If you found this page because you're in recovery and the voices telling you to heal are all in smaller bodies than yours: you're not wrong, and you're not alone.

If we're missing someone essential, a clinician, writer, or athlete who should be here, tell us at yourdietsuckspodcast at gmail dot com.

And if you want more of this conversation in the context of training, fueling, and the science underneath all of it, that's what we're doing every week. You can find the full archive at Your Diet Sucks, and if you want to go deeper, the Patreon community is where the extended research, Q&As, and threads live.

The Bottom Line

Fat liberation is not a wellness trend. It's a political and intellectual tradition built over decades, largely by people whose bodies the wellness industry ignored or actively harmed. The resources above are a starting point. The work is ongoing.